The background of Bonfire Night
Victoria Luo
Bonfire Night is a folk festival, also known as Guy Fawkes Day and Firework Night, is an annual commemoration observed on 5 November, primarily in the United Kingdom.its to commemorate a treason in England in 1605. Dissatisfied with King James I’s religious persecution, guy fox, with a group of extreme Catholics, proposed a gunpowder plot. They secretly transported 36 barrels of black powder into the basement of the adjacent houses of the parliament building, intending to detonate the gunpowder when the king held a meeting on November 5, to blow up the parliament building and kill the king and the politicians.
But one of the outlaws wrote an anonymous letter to the Catholic Lord Monteagle for fear that the Catholic Lords would also be killed. Naturally, the news was soon known to the king. In the early morning of November 5, the king’s guards raided the basement, found a large amount of gunpowder stored, and captured guy. The plot failed.
James I ordered guy Fox and his accomplices to be publicly executed on fire for a state crime. Overnight, guy’s bombing shocked the whole of Britain. Since then, in order to celebrate the collapse of the terrorist plot, British people burn the portrait of guy and set off fireworks every year from January to November 5.
Within a few decades Gunpowder Treason Day, as it was known, became the predominant English state commemoration, but as it carried strong Protestant religious overtones it also became a focus for anti-Catholic sentiment. Puritans delivered sermons regarding the perceived dangers of popery, while during increasingly raucous celebrations common folk burnt effigies of popular hate-figures, such as the pope.
One notable aspect of the Victorians’ commemoration of Guy Fawkes Night was its move away from the centres of communities, to their margins. Gathering wood for the bonfire increasingly became the province of working-class children, who solicited combustible materials, money, food and drink from wealthier neighbour, often with the aid of songs. Most opened with the familiar “Remember, remember, the fifth of November, Gunpowder Treason and Plot”. The earliest recorded rhyme, from 1742, is reproduced below alongside one bearing similarities to most Guy Fawkes Night ditties, recorded in 1903 at Charlton on Otmoor.
